On 31 October 2023, the Inspire team organised an online consultative workshop to gather insights for the establishment of an initial framework for the skills partnership scheme between Georgia and France. The event built upon a previous workshop held in November 2022 and the bilateral engagements that followed throughout 2023.
Participants from both countries’ public sectors, as well as sectorial agencies, provided insights into circular migration frameworks and policies, and Georgia’s ICT sector entrepreneurship strategy. This was followed by tech founders and accelerators sharing their experiences in cross-border entrepreneurship between Georgia and France. The session concluded with an interactive discussion aimed at facilitating dialogue and gathering inputs on the scheme’s specific elements such as pre-departure training, stakeholder roles, potential support mechanisms, and the scheme’s added value to the tech startup ecosystems of both countries.
The Inspire team is now working on developing a skills partnership scheme between Georgia and France. The scheme aims to foster the tech sector’s development in both countries by providing Georgian tech founders with access to French accelerators, networks, and markets, and facilitating knowledge, skills, and innovation exchange between the two ecosystems. The finalised scheme will be presented at a national conference on 21-22 November 2023.
The Inspire project is a regional initiative designed to initiate a structured public-private dialogue on skills partnerships aimed at incubating partnership schemes between the EU Member States and partner countries from Africa, the Western Balkans and the Eastern Partnership region. Concretely, the project will bring together relevant public actors, European small-and-medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), partner country SMEs, industry groups, and financial institutions from the EU and the target regions into a series of national consultations and a partnership laboratory to identify current and future skills needs and propose market-led solutions for labour upskilling and skills matching.